Northrop Grumman Challenges Engineers and Proves Value with Digital Design
Your design and manufacturing experts are going to butt heads anyway. You may as well get it over quickly and reap tremendous benefits.
Defense contracting giant Northrop Grumman deploys Siemens’ Xcelerator platform to keep its engineers, supply chain experts and project managers on the same digital page. Gone are the days of passing CAD files and analysis reports and simulation results between desktops. Data resides in shared repositories accessible to every relevant department at every step of design and manufacturing.
Engineering rework, or part redesign prior to manufacturing, decreased from an average of 20% of the total parts on a particular project to 1%. Manufacturing rework, the need for material review boards, deviations from original design or plain-old mistakes during production, fell by half.
Northrop also proved the digital engineering program’s value through development of the Model 437 Vanguard Technology Demonstrator aircraft, manufactured by subsidiary Scaled Composites. The Model 437 achieved first flight testing in 27 months.
“A little over two years is incredible, if you look at other programs,” says Adam Shepherd, an NG fellow and one of the company’s digital engineering experts.
We spoke with Shepherd at the Realize Live 2025 conference in Detroit to talk about the challenges of adopting new digital engineering tools and managing the organizational changes.
Dennis Scimeca: How do you see this technology applying to manufacturing at large, or for small and medium sized businesses? Is this technology they can use or is it really meant for complicated engineering?
Adam Shepherd: It could be used from the smallest to the largest. I think it’s all scalable. We do small assemblies all the way up to large installations using the same processes. Obviously in aerospace, our approach to simulations, these multi-physics solutions do vary, [but] largely it does apply across all industries. I think we’re all using the same tool set.
In aerospace, we are going as detailed as we can. … What we do results in a physical test, and physical tests are costly, expensive, and they also take a long time in our schedule. So, as we deliver products, the long pole in the tent is testing, because we have to be 100% safe. Our critical mission focus is safety.
The usage of models to go and prove out [safety], we can virtually simulate something that closely matches a physical test, this is where you see the industry as a whole changing, being able to accept simulation in lieu of physical tests. For certain things, you can really compress that test window.
DS: Do you think there are preparatory steps a manufacturer needs to take in order to get started quickly and have early success with these digital tools?
AS: There’s the technical element of digital transformation, or digital engineering, where the tools, the integrations, are capable. There’s also this human element of digital transformation.
We’ve implemented what’s called the shift left, bringing manufacturing experts earlier in the design life cycle. They’re the experts that know how to build this thing or what they need to watch for. Our design engineers…they’re focused on optimizing an air vehicle, not necessarily optimizing for manufacturing.
DS: Designing for manufacturing.
AS: I call it design for producibility, sustainability, maintainability. We now are able to embed our manufacturing teams with our engineers. As we’re designing something, we can make that change.
Historically, I had to export a design, and then a manufacturing engineer imported it. It was a lot of manual effort. We didn’t have time during that design process to do a lot of that iteration. Because the tools are now integrated together, the design engineer hits save, the manufacturing engineer has already done this simulation, he sees that change happen real time and can raise that red flag and say, “Hey, this is a problem.”
DS: In many cases, when manufacturers get everyone onto a single source of truth or get them onto a unified digital stream like what you’re describing, feathers ruffle and heads butt. Did Northrop Grumman experience any of this by adopting the new digital tools?
AS: Absolutely.
DS: How do you work around that? What’s the solution?
AS: The human element of digital is, I would say, a lot harder than the technical element of digital. … Analysts aren’t saving things on their desktops. They’re not printing things out and shoving it in their desk drawer. They’re saving [files] in the same PLM system where CAD models reside. You have that history of information, and that was the first step, to get everybody out of their desktops, out of their desk drawers, to simply expose their models.
That was not trivial, right? A lot of these guys have been doing this for a long time, and that’s the way that they’ve worked for decades.
And that’s just the relationship with design and analysis. You’ve got manufacturing, you’ve got supply chain… program managers, they want to understand, we typically have drawing release or product definition, package release schedules…they don’t need to get into the midst of what that churn looks like. They simply see the status as it’s going through the life cycle.
DS: As the number of people with seats at the digital table expands, that increases the number of heads that could butt, doesn’t it?
AS: Yeah. And what we see is, and a lot of that is happening earlier in the life cycle, if you influence the change early on, the cost impact of that change is reduced. And so, what we’re starting to see is a shift of a lot of those interactions happening very early in the life cycle, where you can still really influence the design and the change at a much more affordable rate.
DS: So, if a manufacturer adopts these digital design tools and sees a lot of conflict early on, that doesn’t mean something’s going wrong, it might actually mean something’s going right?
AS: That’s right.
DS: When you put the manufacturers and the designers together in the same virtual room, who tends to get their feathers ruffled first?
AS: Every day, it’s somebody different. There is a natural tension between design and manufacturing, right? Design has to design state of the art products. Manufacturing has to build them. Tension has this negative connotation, but it’s just that natural tension between engineering and manufacturing that have to work together.
[But] our digital transformation is a result of our culture. It started at the top down, with our CEO standing up the Digital Transformation Office, and she has instilled in all of us that we will be a digitally transformed company, and I think having that leadership from the top down has been paramount.
DS: So there was no resistance whatsoever to this change to the status quo?
AS: The mechanics of applying that [transformation] are where there was some resistance, but where we experienced that, we wanted to show areas of success, demonstrated areas of success, and that’s where you start to see that cultural buy-in.
